![owc aura pro x2 owc aura pro x2](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0-blwFaZi10/maxresdefault.jpg)
Its active idle power draw is far higher than NVMe drives with modern controllers, and turning PCIe ASPM on makes it draw even more power. The Apple SSD uses AHCI instead of NVMe, and none of the usual settings for manipulating power levels for SATA or PCIe drives seem to be of any use. This might be a side effect of the adapter we're using to get the drive working with standard M.2 slots. When the lowest power PCIe ASPM features are enabled, the Aura Pro X2 is no longer able to stay at a low power level and instead jumps up to almost half its active idle.
![owc aura pro x2 owc aura pro x2](https://www.owcshop.eu/catalog/images/slideshow/OWC-EU-Aura-Pro-X2.jpg)
The active idle and desktop idle numbers are in line with expectations and are comparable to other SM2262EN drives. The OWC Aura Pro X2 is the first drive we've subjected to our updated idle power measurement test that seems to have a compatibility problem.
![owc aura pro x2 owc aura pro x2](https://i0.wp.com/www.pocnetwork.net/wp-content/zuploads/2019/04/OWC-Aura-Pro-X2.jpg)
The below measurements are all new this month, and are not a perfect match for the older measurements in our previous reviews and the Bench database. Note: We recently upgraded our power measurement equipment and switched to measuring idle power on our Coffee Lake desktop, our first SSD testbed to have fully-functional PCIe power management. Since we don't have a way to enable SATA DevSleep on any of our testbeds, SATA drives are omitted from the Laptop Idle charts. The Laptop Idle number represents the maximum power savings possible with all the NVMe and PCIe power management features in use-usually the default for a battery-powered system but rarely achievable on a desktop even after changing BIOS and OS settings. Our Desktop Idle number represents what can usually be expected from a desktop system that is configured to enable SATA link power management, PCIe ASPM and NVMe APST, but where the lowest PCIe L1.2 link power states are not available. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. Additionally, there are multiple degrees of PCIe link power savings possible through Active State Power Management (APSM).
OWC AURA PRO X2 DRIVER
There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks, and depending on which NVMe driver is in use. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state. SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. The power and latency numbers are often very conservative estimates, but they are what the OS uses to determine which idle states to use and how long to wait before dropping to a deeper idle state. Note that the above tables reflect only the information provided by the drive to the OS. The drive provides fairly conservative estimates for maximum power in its active power states – in practice, our synthetic tests didn't push it much beyond 4W. The OWC Aura Pro X2 declares support for all the usual power management features expected on a modern M.2 NVMe SSD, with two idle states that balance power savings against transition latency. Non-Operational Power State Permissive Mode Number of non-operational (idle) power states Number of operational (active) power states NVMe Power and Thermal Management Features
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They may also be used in locations with high ambient temperatures and poor cooling, such as tucked under a GPU on a desktop motherboard, or in a poorly-ventilated notebook. M.2 SSDs can concentrate a lot of power in a very small space. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.įor many NVMe SSDs, the closely related matter of thermal management can also be important. Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use.